1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to accessing messages contained in remote universal multimedia mailboxes and more particularly to extending access to environments where computer systems are not available.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Electronic messaging services including electronic mail, voice mail and digital fax are common in today's business and home environments. In addition a trend towards universal or unified messaging is currently underway. It is an object of the present invention to develop a system that operates under the assumption that an extensible Universal Messaging System with basic message storage-and-forward capabilities is in place. Such systems are now commercially available as described in "Unified Messaging" Computer Telephony Magazine, August 1996.
The prior art also includes voice mail systems such as the one described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,568,540 entitled "Method and Apparatus for Selecting and Playing a Voice Mail Message". This patent discloses a system which provides telephone-based remote message access. These systems however, are limited to voice and, in some instances, fax. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system that addresses much more elaborate messages containing arbitrarily complex multimedia objects.
Some of the systems described in "Unified Messaging" also provide support for remote access of e-mail messages. However, this support is based on text-to-speech conversion only and is limited to the text portion of the message body. It is an object of the present invention to extend this functionality to every message class in the system, and to enhance it by incorporating the use of fax as a way to provide visual feedback on the content of the message. For example, an image or a video could be provided.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system capable of handling two special message classes: Dynamic image annotation which involves computer-generated messages in which synchronized voice, mouse movements and graphics are used to describe conditions associated with the contents of an underlying image; and browsable video messages which consists of video clips which have been pre-processed to identify scene changes and prepared for browsing. Such message types are not available in existing prior art systems.